arrested development. She had continued to divide, to specialize, and to hierarchize where other peoples had unified, mobilized, and levelled. Why she had thus crystallized and intensified an early stage of civilization M. Bouglé was not then prepared to say.

The second and third parts of the present work are in some measure an answer to the question. The author recognizes the difficulties in his way arising chiefly from the comparative poverty of historical documents. He cannot, therefore, trace

in detail the flux and reflux of the various forces dominant from time to time in the life of the peninsula as we can trace those of Europe. In dealing with the vitality of Caste, therefore, he takes only two salient moments in its long course on which we are best informed, namely, its contest with Buddhism and its struggle against the European influences concentrated upon it under British administration.

Beyond doubt Buddhism directly opposes the authority of the Brahmans, and it seems at first sight to be a deadly enemy of Caste. Caste is repudiated in Buddhist teachings; it is ignored in Buddhist communities. But those communities are gathered out of the world. By the vows of mendicity and chastity imposed upon them they are withdrawn alike from the ordinary toils of life and the ordinary social relations. The rules of hereditary specialization, as well as those of marriage within the caste, therefore cease to weigh upon their members. But those rules continue to be observed by the external adherents. The laity, who contribute to maintain the monks or whose children enter the monasteries, do not cease to gain their bread in the manner of their fathers, or to choose their wives without trespassing over the consecrated boundaries. Converts they may be to the Buddhist faith; they remain enclosed notwithstanding in the Brahmanic organization. Buddhism raised no standard of revolt against a pressing social tyranny; it rather gave a signal for flight. Preoccupied with the question of escaping from the world, it was incapable of leading a real social reform. Its essential pessimism sterilized the germs of reform as soon as they were sown by its proselytism.

upon the good or evil deeds of a previous life, sanctifies, petrifies, perpetuates the inequality of social conditions, the division of society into castes. Hence when the propaganda had run its course, when the early enthusiasm had died away, when the countenance of the ruler was given no longer, Buddhism disappeared, probably without any serious persecution or political convulsion, and left not a trace upon Caste.

The relations of the English administration to Caste would lead us into questions better avoided in these pages. M. Bouglé comes to the conclusion that the pressure of the English administration upon Caste is much less than might be thought likely indeed, in some directions it is even favourable to it. In any case, the operation of wearing it down by foreign influence must be extremely gradual and slow. A weighty chapter is that given to the consideration of the Hindu law in its relation to Caste. The law has had its origin in religion. It has superseded with a larger and more general compass the law of the family from which it sprang. A secular power (the king), it is true, was needed to impose it; but the priest (the Brahman) remained the lawgiver, the interpreter. The life of the Hindus is essentially a village life. This follows from their organization into castes. Those who have a common way of life, a common occupation, connubium, commensality, naturally live in touch with one another; they draw apart from others who are strangers, whose touch defiles. The groups thus formed are incapable of coalition in active and continued resistance against external foes; each of them can only oppose to the pressure from above the passive resistance of its own traditions. These traditions are religious traditions. The essentially secular institution of the municipality has never existed. Consequently a genuinely political organization in which the government and the governed are knit together into one homogeneous body has always been wanting. The Brahman as lawyer has found it to his interest to favour the perpetuation of this congeries of uncemented social fragments. Religion, the emphatic words of his sacred books, feed his pride of caste, and require him to insist on the subordination of all others

social system, and prohibited in stringent terms any departure from them. But in the process of enforcing these codes he has been compelled to tolerate and register much of the existing custom of the non-Aryan races of the peninsula, he has adopted and identified with his own divinities many of the indigenous gods, and he has thus provided an easy means of welcoming into the bosom of the Caste system every native tribe that may desire to enter.

The effect of Caste on art and commerce, on production and consumption, belongs to economics, and cannot be discussed here, interesting as it is. The relations of literature to Caste are sketched by M. Bouglé. The opinion of the late Prof. Max Muller that the Vedas, and particularly the Rig Veda, disclose a condition of society and of thought that can be called primitive has long ago been abandoned. They were produced among an invading and conquering people, and they were the literature of a priestly class strongly entrenched behind an elaborate ritual of which the priests were the guardians and sole administrators. If the entire literature of India be not indebted to the same class for its origin, at least it is no exaggeration to say that almost all the literary monuments of the country are directly based upon religion. "Not merely," says Victor Henry, "does India possess the most extensive and one of the most ancient and interesting sacred literatures of the world, but the very term 'profane literature,' as we understand it, is without meaning in it, and finds no application unless by way of contrast." Even when, as in the case of the great epics, it proceeds from the Kshatriya Caste and reflects in the main Kshatriya ideas and sentiments, it passes from the hands of the feudal bard into those of the Brahman. He who is at once priest, jurist, and philosopher takes possession of it, as in the famous episode of the Bhagavad-gitâ, where Arjuna, as he rushes into battle, stays his car while his charioteer, who is no other than the god Krishna, reveals to him in a long succession of slokas the most subtle reflections of the metaphysicians on the non-existence of beings. Thus the bedrock of the story is overlaid by theology and metaphysics until the epopee is no longer at the service of

feudal traditions, but becomes the exponent of the Brahmanical ideal.

The preoccupation with religion visible in the earliest literature of the Aryan immigrants and their repulsion from the indigenous populations are thus emphasized and continued in art, industry, commerce, law, and literature-in all the varied relations of society and life-throughout history. No sufficient counteracting force has ever appeared, nothing to draw together the centrifugal units of society, no common interest deep enough to reach below the old racial hatreds and religious exclusiveness characteristic of the beginnings of civilization, no perpetual everpressing need to weld the countless disparate communities into a fully organized state. On the contrary, even the economic development has made common cause with the relentless determination of the Brahman and the fitful and superficial tyrannies of military conquerors and overlords to preserve and multiply the cleavages. The result has been a stunting of industry as well as a dissipation of energies which might have availed to build up a powerful and progressive nation.

Probably until modern times no other Aryan speaking colonists ever subjugated races for which they felt such profound aversion as that felt for the Dasyus by the people who produced the Vedas and the Shastras. Thirty generations hence our remote descendants may have other histories to compare-and perchance to contrast-with that of the Aryan conquerors of Northern India.

The sketch I have tried to give of M. Bouglé's argument will render it clear how valuable a contribution it is to the solution of the problems offered by the mysterious East to the Western student. This first volume of the new Travaux de l'Année Sociologique leads us to form enhanced expectations for the work of constructive criticism by the collaboration under more favourable conditions of the band of scholars hitherto led with such success by M. Durkheim.

E. SIDNEY HARTLAND.

AU BON VIEUX TEMPS RÉCITS, CONTES ET LÉGENDES DE L'ANCIEN BOCAGE NORMAND. JEUX, VIEILLES CHANSONS (Vingt airs notés). A. MADELAINE. Tom I. Caen :

Henri Delesques, 1907.

A COLLECTION (as the title-page indicates) of folk-tales, games and songs. The tales are chiefly of the kind known as sagas, tales relating to definite places and to personages whose existence was actually believed in. Many of these personages are in fact well known to history. Of William the Conqueror, for instance, there is a tale told of the terrible vengeance he took upon a treacherous feudatory who first endeavoured to seduce the duchess Matilda, and failing that accused her of adultery to the duke. Her furious husband caused her to be dragged at the tail of a fiery horse through the street of Falaise, which in memory of the event is even yet called the Rue du Sang, and then cast into prison to await death next day. Overcome meanwhile by an access of doubt and remorse the duke disguised himself the next morning as a priest and confessed her. He thus satisfied himself of her innocence and restored her to liberty. Then he pursued her traducer. Having caught him he flayed him alive, caused him to be fastened to four horses and thus torn to pieces, and his heart suspended to the branch of a tree.

The collection would have been of much greater value if the author had given the stories without any literary artifice or garnishing, verbatim in the language of the peasants who told them, and had separated his historical and local notes (often useful) from the text. E. SIDNEY HARTLAND.

THE ELDER OR POETIC EDDA, commonly known as SÆMUND'S EDDA. Part I. The Mythological poems, edited and translated with Introduction and Notes by OLIVE BRAY. Illustrated by W. G. COLLINGWOOD. Viking Club Translation Series. 15s. net. (David Nutt.)

WHETHER We consider the question from the standpoint of folk